Snapchat Beefs Up Measurement With Moat, DoubleClick Partnerships

Snapchat added Moat and DoubleClick to its measurement arsenal Thursday.

Moat will enable measurement based on viewability, audibility and human audiences. The Google DoubleClick ad server joins nine other measurement partners, including Sizmek and Innovid, to help ensure an ad has been served and to add reach and frequency data.

With these third-party measurement tools in place, Snapchat hopes to differentiate itself from other mobile ad experiences and position itself to capture TV budgets targeting millennials. Adding third-party measurement also will increase marketer confidence in the platform.

“Transparency via third-party measurement increases marketers engagement with the platform, which in our experience can lead to increased dollars,” said Moat CEO Jonah Goodhart.

Snapchat will use Moat’s new Video Score metric, which rates platforms from zero to 100 based on factors like audio, viewability, exposure time and one completely new metric: screen real estate. Advertisers can use it on a campaign level, and Moat will release quarterly scoring aggregated across platforms.

Video Score’s metrics will likely position Snapchat favorably against other mobile ad platforms, since its interface takes up the entire screen and is usually played with audio.

In contrast to Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat ads have audio on by default, and two-thirds of ads are consumed with audio on, according to Snapchat data. In comparison, about 85% of Facebook video ads are viewed on mute, according to results seen by Facebook publishers and agencies.

Moat will allow marketers to validate Snapchat’s assertions about high audio-on rates as well as standardize video views.

“We … support Moat as they move the industry forward by delivering a new metric that measures sight, sound and motion of a video,” Snapchat Chief Strategy Officer Imran Khan said in a statement.

Snapchat wants to be perceived as quickly developing capabilities associated with a mature ad platform. A year and a half into selling ads, Snapchat has gone from one to 10 measurement partners.

While early advertisers complained about the lack of third-party measurement tools and high rates, they voiced more nuanced measurement critiques recently, focused on audience targeting and gauging performance, indicating that identifying and measuring Snapchat’s audience is still far from complete.

But Snapchat is in a race as other platforms vie for both digital and TV ad budget.

Snapchat claims, through research it commissioned from MediaScience, that it outperforms both TV and other mobile video platforms in emotional response (measured by wiring up 320 study participants). Snapchat captured twice the visual attention as Facebook ads, 1.5 times the attention of Instagram ads and 1.3 times the attention of YouTube ads.